RTÉ NSO to perform Mozart at NUIG

THE RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, with pianist and conductor Finghin Collins, will play the Bailey Allen Hall, Áras na Mac Leinn, NUI, Galway, on Tuesday March 8 at 8pm.

The concert is part of orchestra’s ‘all-Mozart’ spring tour as they will perform three of the great man’s piano concerti. The performance will also mark something of a ‘double first’ for both the orchestra and Finghin Collins.

The concert will mark his tour début with the RTÉ NSO and see him reach yet another milestone in the mammoth challenge which he has undertaken as the first RTÉ NSO Associate Artist: the performance of the complete cycle of 23 Mozart piano concerti, the majority of them directed from the keyboard. This will also be the first time the orchestra has performed in the Bailey Allen Hall.

For the tour, Finghin will perform and direct, as Mozart himself would have done, three contrasting concerti including two of the greatest: the rollicking E flat major, K482, grandiose and majestic with its beguiling finale, and the much-loved ‘Elvira Madigan’, K467 in C major which, with its gorgeous second movement made famous in the movie, is from start to finish, one of the jewels in Mozart’s crown.

“Directing these concertos from the piano just feels like the right thing to do,” says Mr Collins. “After all, it’s the way the great man himself performed them. Imagine how these works must have impressed the Viennese music-lovers in the late 18th century with their freshness and vigour, their glorious operatic melodies! It is my hope they will sound as fresh and vigorous in our performances as the day they were first performed.”